From writer Robert Kirkman and artist Charlie Adlard comes The Walking Dead comic series from Skybound and Image. Check out our review of issue #142.

The Walking Dead revolves around the life of Rick Grimes, a small-town police officer and his family, and a number of other survivors who have banded together in order to survive after the world is overrun with zombies.

You’re going to see the most human characters that you’ve probably ever seen in one place and not killing one another in this chapter of The Walking Dead. With all of the civilized communities coming together to celebrate Rick’s festival, everything seems extremely peaceful at the moment. You could probably say that about the entire series however as there haven’t been too many violent revelations. I’m not even counting the shocking death of a supporting character last issue.

The way Maggie sums up what happened in the prior issue regarding that character’s death makes sense and it looks like everybody is simply just going to be moving on without giving much of a shit. That being said, I’d like to think Robert Kirkman’s writing style follows the path of every action has an eventual consequence. Most of this issue is build-up, for what I’m not too sure and the ending panel didn’t shock me in any way so I’m still not sure where this is headed. If tension is supposed to be building, I’m not feeling it but maybe that’s not the point either.

The most exciting moments for me are Carl’s interactions with the whisperers and the panels where they carve up a zombie corpse in order to make a skin-coat out of the poor bastard are some of the most entertaining aspects of an otherwise slow-moving issue. Charlie Adlard continues to surprise the hell out of me, drawing at such a rapid pace and in this issue he has to come up with some very large set pieces. Even if none of them are action-based, it’s still impressive.

Because of the results regarding the All Out War event, we now are left with too many interesting characters and not enough time to do anything ultimately that interesting story-wise with most of them, which leads to way too many slow-moving chapters such as this. Kirkman should have killed a few more in order to get us back to that headspace where we can care about these people. At this point I’m starting to not care for any of them except Negan and he’s the psychopath in lockup. It’s because he’s the only one who has a clear goal – freedom. Everyone else is so comfortable that I’ve grown tired of giving a shit what happens to them, whereas the maniac who is in a cage in Rick’s basement has something to work towards. Either free Negan, or let those dickhead whisperers cull the herd a little more. Thank you please.